1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to spatial position indexing, and more specifically, to a method and apparatus for vehicle position indexing.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of Global Position System (GPS) technology, the vehicle trajectory can be conveniently monitored in real time, which facilitates rapid development of the vehicle spatial position indexing technology. The spatial position indexing technology is widely used in fields such as parking lot, logistic companies and vehicle operating service providers, and the like.
The vehicle position indexing technology generally relates to two kinds of spatial-temporal data: one is static road network data with low update frequency, in which the data amount changes slowly over time and can be preprocessed; the other is real-time data of a vehicle, e.g. GPS data, etc., in which, the update is fast and the data amount grows rapidly with the growth of time; thus it is necessary to store and query massive real-time position information of vehicles.
In order to improve the real-time performance of storing and querying, conventional spatial position indexing technologies, such as grid indexing or R-tree indexing, are introduced into all of the existing spatial position databases. However, these existing index technologies have two big problems: on one hand, the cost for updating and maintaining the index is huge, and especially a big challenge exists in dealing with the storage of massive real-time data; on the other hand, when the data amount is very large, the index itself will become very huge, thereby deteriorating query performance.
Apparently, there is still room for improvement in the existing technology, and it is demanded to provide a technical solution of building a vehicle position index with high efficiency.